gh-mgomes-3xo-suit-plugins-dotfiles/skills/searching-files/reference/macos.md

Use Spotlight for searching

Search Current Directory and Subdirectories

bash

mdfind -onlyin . "search term"

Or you can be more explicit:

bash

mdfind -onlyin "$PWD" "search term"

Examples

Find all PDF files in current directory tree:

bash

mdfind -onlyin . "kMDItemContentType == 'com.adobe.pdf'"

Search for files containing "config" in current directory:

bash

mdfind -onlyin . "config"

Find files by name in current directory:

bash

mdfind -onlyin . -name "*.txt"

Reading Files

textutil is a powerful built-in macOS command-line utility for converting between various document formats. It's particularly useful for extracting text from documents or converting between formats.

Supported Input Formats

Text formats:

• .txt - Plain text
• .rtf - Rich Text Format
• .rtfd - RTF with attachments
• .html - HTML documents
• .xml - XML documents

Document formats:

• .doc - Microsoft Word (older format)
• .docx - Microsoft Word (newer format)
• .odt - OpenDocument Text
• .pages - Apple Pages documents

Other formats:

• .pdf - PDF documents
• .webarchive - Safari web archives

Supported Output Formats

You can convert to these formats using the -convert option:

• txt - Plain text
• rtf - Rich Text Format
• rtfd - RTF with attachments
• html - HTML
• xml - XML
• doc - Microsoft Word
• docx - Microsoft Word (newer)
• odt - OpenDocument Text
• webarchive - Web archive

Common Usage Examples

Convert PDF to text:

textutil -convert txt document.pdf
textutil -convert txt document.pdf -output extracted.txt

Convert Word doc to plain text:

textutil -convert txt document.docx

Convert multiple files:

textutil -convert txt *.pdf
textutil -convert html *.rtf

Extract text from Pages document:

textutil -convert txt document.pages -output text_version.txt